


stand and face me, my love

by computational (phraseme)



Category: Miss Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Codependency, F/F, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Finale, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:33:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26588944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phraseme/pseuds/computational
Summary: and scatter the grace in your eyes.sappho, fragment 138.the reunion of sherlock and wato after reichenbach.
Relationships: Sherlock | Futaba Sara Shelly/Tachibana Wato
Comments: 14
Kudos: 33





	stand and face me, my love

She can see the familiar shape, the way her hair gathers and spills over her shoulder (strong positive selection of the ectodysplasin A receptor gene, 88% frequency of the 1540C allele), ground ink in the well, nightfall on a far horizon. Sherlock walks _moderato_ , at a rate of 14 beats-per-minute faster than her usual march. Wato has yet to turn around. 

She picks up the pace and wonders if she knows the distinctive tap-tap-tap sound on the pavement (ten-millimetre heel tips with a titanium pin, size 55 Manolo Blahniks. She'd broken a heel once, driving the tip through a suspect's foot just so he'd stop running, and her brother had showed up the next day with a congruent pair). Wato had never asked about the shoes, never commented on the weight when she picked them up from the floor. _Sherlock!_ she'd hiss, the smallest bite of reprimand in her mouth. _Sherlock!_ Chasing her after slipping on her own shoes, blissfully unaware she was carrying 125,450 yen (1200 US currency, 936 pounds sterling, 101864 Bangladeshi taka) black leather weapons in her hands.

Wato's head bends down, her body a crumpled serviette on the breakfast tray. Almost as if she's looking for something, dropped something small in the middle of the street. Sherlock almost laughs (to [spoil] the surprise, to steal, to be carried away) because Wato looks like the hermit crab waiting for the next vacant shell to open up, her bags and hands full but still looking for the dropped object. Clutching the bamboo-green Hermes trench as it overflows from her arms. _Coenobita clypeatus_. 

Sherlock tucks her hands into her coat pockets, fingers brushing against the fifth burner phone and loose bills (nonsequential serial numbers, the _Genji_ excerpt printed in blue-black intaglio). She's excited about this, curious(er and curiouser, [ _superprehendere_ ] to 'seize', to overtake) for the way Wato will react, doe eyes wide and mouth hanging open. Sherlock leans over to get the best seat in the house, close up enough to see Wato's pupils dilate when she registers who has managed to outdo herself again.

"Did you lose something?" she asks, her voice light and airy, because she just can't help herself. Sherlock smiles when the familiar head whips up, Wato's shoulders stiffening and hunching together all at once. "Drop something somewhere?"

"You—" Wato says, or gasps, her breath staggering from her soft mouth. Her hands dig into the trench, into fists, and Sherlock has microseconds before the color drains from Wato's face.

It's not elegant, but it's better than Wato on the pavement, Sherlock catching her on the way down. "Really," Sherlock grumbles, but she isn't displeased (antenantiosis // Östen Dahl's aspects of linguistic typology). Wato's breathing is shallow [calculating the respiratory rate (breaths per minute) over tidal volume] and her skin feels clammy. Sherlock can conclude with a confidence coefficient of 99 that this is not a surprise, but a shock. 

She supports Wato with an arm around her waist, digs for the burner phone with the other. Her brother will have to send a car; there's no way Sherlock is walking back now, with Wato and Wato's bags. She can feel the heavy swing of Wato's hair in the low ponytail, her head lolling against Sherlock's shoulder like a child asleep, albeit with shadows under her eyes.

The car takes too long: fifteen minutes and twenty-six seconds to pull up to the curb. Sherlock puts Wato's head on her lap for the drive home, covers her in bamboo-green for warmth. 

* * *

Kento opens the door when Sherlock gets there, Wato still out cold (Julia, wife of Pompey, as painted by Angelika Kauffmann). Sherlock had spent her time in the car measuring the way Wato's breaths came and went, if she was breathing at all (fingertips over her mouth, cello calluses strange against the soft plush of her lips). "Bags in the trunk." Sherlock jerks her head over to the idling car. "Get your minion to do it." 

"He's an executive assistant," Kento sniffs, but glides over to the driver's side anyway. "Hatano-san's asking where you've been."

Sherlock rolls her eyes since he can't see, considers making a public donation to a terribly embarrassing cause in his name. At least she can count on their landlady to react properly. She waits for Kento to come back so he can haul Wato's heavy limbs up the stairs. Sherlock doesn't like her chances of doing that alone; there are too many ways for them both to fall over and break their necks. One thousand torques each for the effort, to get a clean snap. 

"I changed my bank passwords again." Sherlock darts out from under the weight, side still warm where it pressed against Wato's, to open the door. Curses Kento and his overdeveloped sense of cryptosecurity. 

"Challenge accepted," she replies, but most of her focus is already on the familiar room: the long, low seat against the window, her swivel chair in the nook she uses as an office, the piles of handwritten notes in varying sizes of tea-splotched sheets, leaves raked together on the carpeted floor. The dining table coated in soft char intumescent, because it is the perfect height to conduct her chemistry assays. 

Wato watched the antibody titrations while she finished her miso and rice in the morning. Sherlock can almost see it, a faint mirage of the past shimmering in and out of view. "Over there is fine." She gestures to the chaise lounge, the antique thing that Wato calls a couch and nobody calls a loveseat, with its multiple throw pillows and knitted blankets. Sherlock can feel it in her bones; it's going to be that kind of night, with three emergency truffles and a machine-processed milk chocolate bar. 

Kento takes one before he leaves, the sea salt caramel enrobed in dark chocolate. Sherlock resolves to double the charitable donation and leak it to the press by the weekend. 

* * *

Wato wakes up the way Sherlock might expect: in a sudden fit, as if she'd fallen through the roof only to land in some soft, unfamiliar place. "Hey, _hey_ ," she says, and if her voice is quiet it's only to match the frequency of the streetlamps, their orange-yellow glow a gauzy haze through the curtains. "It's the eighth of April, at 2:47 in the morning. You are Tachibana Wato, and this is 221B—"

"I know where I am." Her eyes (wide, coffee-brown, glassy) meet Sherlock's before she closes them tight. "I know who I am, too." Wato's voice is so low Sherlock strains to hear it, a tired, quailing music Sherlock's rarely heard before. "So you don't have to tell me." Sherlock sits beside Wato's legs so she can stay face-to-face, a strange mirror of an interrogation. "I just didn't think I'd be back here again."

Her voice cracks halfway through and Wato's head bows down, shoulders shaking, fists clenched so hard her knuckles turn white. Sherlock thinks it might be a D-sharp, the cascading pattern of words a minor scale from thereon. Even Wato's forearms tremble, her whole body tense as a wire, spring steel construction and tungsten-silver winding. Sherlock wonders if Wato will hit her with the force she's clearly trying to repress. (Sherlock had snapped her A string once when playing Britten's First Suite for unaccompanied cello. It had gouged a thin, bloody line across her cheek.) Fragility is the measurement of stress needed to damage an artifact. 

"Where else was I supposed to take you?" She can't imagine going anywhere else, even to one of the many safehouses she's kept in Tokyo. Sherlock isn't sure how much deprogramming Wato will need before the procerus muscle ( _pyramidalis nasi_ , located between the eyebrows, inferomedial to the frontalis muscles) stops creasing, zygomaticus group tensing in a classic sign of human terror. Sherlock puts her hand there, palm cupping the cheekbone as her thumb presses with the grain of the muscle underneath. She can feel Wato shaking as the shock settles in.

 _Medice, cura te ipsum_ , Sherlock thinks, although Wato is not technically a doctor and Sherlock rarely solves a problem without agitation, breaking the bone to align it. Sherlock is at best a scalpel, intended for both surgery and autopsy—but Wato needs neither things, and the list of things she might need instead is beyond her, an abstract without heuristics. ( _Are you curious, or are you after the truth?_ ) "Wato," Sherlock begins, and starts to retract her hand when both of Wato's fly up to clutch it. Her fingers tangle together to cage Sherlock's, urgent and swift. 

"No," she whispers, and Sherlock can see Wato finally open her eyes. She's still crying. Her hands are cold. "You can't leave." 

"I'm not going anywhere," she points out slowly, in case Wato had missed the obvious. In any case, Sherlock would prefer to sleep somewhere that isn't under a bridge; she hates the way the commercial heavy industries trucks rumble overhead.

"Really?" Brittleness: the type of fragility that shatters upon significant impact. Sherlock thinks of it (where K is the strength coefficient) as Wato looks at her ( _oculesics_ , the study of eye movement, a field Sherlock has neglected until now). The night dark will throw off any calculations Sherlock can make, although she might estimate Wato's pupils at 9 millimetres in diameter. She doesn't have enough chocolate to find out.

"Yes, really." Sherlock says, and Wato nods but does not let go. Sherlock watches her drift off before following her in sleep, the hours slipping by unmarked.

* * *

"That child cried every night in her sleep," Hatano-san says, her words hissed just quietly enough for Sherlock to hear. Wato is still upstairs, either asleep or merely silent. 

Sherlock misses the routine of her cello, thinks about the fifth Bach suite prelude's resonant, slow movements. She had hardly put her bow to string when Hatano-san had opened the door and beckoned Sherlock to come out, steely-eyed like she'd slap Sherlock again. She hadn't liked that experience the first time, so she puts her instrument away and makes her way down. Hatano-san's shoulders are stiff, her back straight; she does not make Sherlock any coffee. 

"What do you want me to do about it?" This is what Sherlock doesn't like about common psychology: it is not deviant enough to be interesting, its toothless exchanges and combatives providing no novelty, only tedium. "She didn't do that last night." 

"Of course she didn't," Hatano-san replies, her stern posture giving way to something more relaxed. Sherlock wonders how Kento had kept her from going upstairs yesterday anyhow, offers her no further observations or conclusions. She can feel a caffeine withdrawal headache building. "Oh, Sherlock." Hatano-san shakes her head. "Go back upstairs and play something. I'll leave your coffee in a tray by the door."

* * *

Sherlock does not play the Bach, or Debussy, or even the Britten. She leaves her instrument where she'd left it to stand at Wato's side, observing her sleeping form, the even rise and fall of her chest. Sherlock looks for tear tracks and can find none, only the way Wato's fingers are still laced together (da Vinci's underdrawing of _The Virgin on the Rocks_ , the palimpsest showing the impression of what was there before). Sherlock reaches out to see, remembers the trembling cheek nested against her palm. Wato shows no signs of distress. 

"Sherlock?" Wato mumbles, and Sherlock snatches her hand away—no point in measuring her vitals now. "You're still here," she says, almost to herself rather than Sherlock (which defeats the purpose of the statement, since Sherlock is indeed right there and perfectly capable of asserting that herself).

"Hatano-san has coffee." Epiphany, revelation (the moment of _anagnorisis_ , the critical breakthrough) slams through Sherlock and she knows what to play, Imogen Holst's _Fall of the Leaf_ and its third movement. Impulse and inertia, the start and stoppage of time. She practically runs to her cello to play, tightens her bow and begins the piece before her mind can catch up, the loose ends of every branching thought straggling behind the whirling mass of bittersweet notes.

Hatano-san knocks twice on the door, and Sherlock registers the clink of teacups and little else. Wato sighs before getting up to open the door, retrieving the tea tray and watching Sherlock from the corner of her eye. The double stops punctuate each phrase as a twinned cry, played _poco adagio_. Wato sits across from her, hands wrapped around her coffee cup. Sherlock doesn't know if she's listening, if she listens the way Sherlock does when someone plays. Sherlock doesn't ask.

Wato is misty-eyed when Sherlock finishes the piece, says nothing until the cello and bow are both tucked away. "Yours is on the table." It's not what Sherlock had expected her to say, but black coffee cools at a rate of 1.2666(6) degrees Celsius per minute. The falling leaf eventually flutters to a stop for good.

* * *

April is peak _hanami_ season, when cherry blossom petals float in the wind and people gather under the shade to picnic, loud and carefree. Sherlock keeps the windows firmly closed against the springtime pollen and the pink botanical confetti. She doesn't need detritus among the clutter.

Kento emails her news articles to keep her occupied, although they're nowhere near as stimulating as a real case. Sherlock cannot cut open a webpage to examine the chest cavity or chase it into the waiting arms of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, and she can feel herself rusting from disuse. _Have patience_ , he writes. _Bringing people back from the dead is hard_. Sherlock deletes the message out of spite. 

She plays for Wato, just as before but not quite. At four in the morning, when Wato jolts up shuddering from night terrors, Sherlock's name on her lips as her fingers scrabble in Sherlock's dressing gown—that is when she plays Gabrieli. At sunrise, when Wato's eyelids droop heavy after a night of fits and starts, Circadian rhythm disrupted without reset, Sherlock plays the sixth Bach suite allemande, meditative and precise. There is no space for a piano, although Sherlock thinks about it at times, Mendelssohn or Liszt (silk viscose pajamas, or the mock-neck black shirt with paper bag waist trousers in the daytime). But out of all the instruments she knows how to play, the cello is her favorite, its voice ringing through her whole body as it resonates (tuned to 440 hertz at open strings). She can't stand the sound of screaming.

"I'd see you sometimes, when I was—" Wato's bangs hide her eyes, but she's sniffling, her words cut to shreds by the broken glass in her throat. Tonight, Sherlock's played the entirety of the Bach sixth, Wato slowly coming back to the present as recognition dawns on her features. "I imagined you so clearly it was like you were standing there." 

Sherlock can guess the distance: fifty paces apart, then one hundred (five meters and beyond before the shooter can escape the blood spatter). Her blood would still be warm by the time it touches Wato's skin, staining her clothes. "And?" she prompts ( _Gudjonsson suggestibility scale yield 1_ , an imperfect but quick method of gauging memory recall). Sherlock has learned that Wato's output is greater than or equal to external input without change, closer to an amplifier than a catalyst.

"And you never did anything like _that_." Wato looks up and offers a watery smile. "I can't remember if you were ever this nice." Sherlock can feel the cadenza buzzing in her fingertips again, the 300Hz note at 85 decibels. Short of pressing Wato's face to the top plate of her cello, there's no way to transfer the feeling, but Sherlock still thinks about it. 

"Don't call me that." She has a reputation to maintain, and Shibata calling her soft is hardly conducive to an efficient work environment. "I'm not nice."

"Okay," Wato agrees, which Sherlock finds too suspicious by half. But her smile doesn't go away. "It's okay. I won't tell."

**Author's Note:**

> orz i'm sorry for the parentheses but i didn't know how else to convey her weird thought process (episode 3 when she's cracking the passcodes had such cool visual cues!! TAT) anyway im 2 years 2 late to this show but for what it's worth i am 10000% in it now ... hello everyone
> 
> some nerdy notes: 
> 
> \- acd holmes returns to scare the living bejeezus out of watson in april (see: the adventure of the empty house).  
> \- _medice, cura te ipsum_ is the vulgate latin quote for 'physician, heal thyself,' a common phrase that points out the hypocrisy of the effort.  
> \- imogen holst is the daughter of gustav holst. here is steven isserlis playing [the third movement of her composition 'fall of the leaf'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWGRNcvqMoE).  
> \- and [here is yo-yo ma playing bach's cello suite no. 6 in d major](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnUVrMgsRFA), commonly acknowledged as one of the hardest pieces in classical cello repertoire.


End file.
